How 30,000 Hours of Nature Sounds Were Distilled Into An Album

When Martyn Stewart was 11 years old, he spent countless hours in the woods near his family’s home in Birmingham, England. It was the mid 1960s, and out there in the untouched forest he was captivated by the sounds of nature: the wind, the animals, the water in the streams.

It was around this time that he acquired a recording device and brought it outside. “The first recording I ever made that I kept was the Eurasian Blackbird,” Stewart says today. “He became my mate. He was the guy who taught me melodies.” 

Decades later, Stewart’s collection of nature sounds includes 97,000 individual recordings making up 30,000 hours. (That’s roughly 3.5 years.) The library includes the sounds of more than 3,500 bird species, countless insects, and myriad frogs, toads, mammals, trees, deserts, oceans and more, with Stewart capturing these field recordings in more than 60 countries.  

Now, a select few of them are folded into Imperfect Cadence, a collaborative album by Stewart and Robert Shields, a Scottish singer, songwriter and producer who makes music under the moniker ONR. On the album, Shields sings and plays instruments that complement and fuse with sounds Stewart recorded in Scotland during the mid-1970s, a time he spent traveling across the country — often on foot — recording the symphony of its vast, untouched and famously stunning wilderness.  

It was “a sanctuary where I could go and lose myself, basically,” Stewart says. “Anywhere you dropped a microphone, you got a fantastic recording.” (Years later, when he was in his late 20s, Stewart learned that his biological father was Scottish, which he believes accounts for his affinity for the country.) 

Shields got involved in the project through Steven Melrose, the global head of creative at Los Angeles-based publishing company Seeker Music, who is also Scottish. Melrose was working with ONR when he was approached by Stewart’s niece, Amanda, who was hoping to mesh her uncle’s recordings with music in a respectful and contemporary way. Melrose introduced Shields and Stewart, and it was decided — given everyone’s connection to Scotland — the project would focus there.  

Shields and Stewart subsequently met on Zoom to chat about making something together. Shields found himself entranced by Stewart’s life story and work. “The real kicker was when he then sent me the audio, which is just unbelievable,” Shields says. 

Recordings include those Stewart made in areas around the famously picturesque Rannoch Moor, Culloden Moor, the site of a famous 1746 battle, and while walking along Hadrian’s Wall, an ancient Roman stone fortification dating back to 122 AD. “You kind of get into that mood of desolation and isolation,” Stewart says of being in these locations, even just through the audio. “You almost feel your primal self again. You can feel the blood pulsing through your veins.” 

“The last thing I wanted to do was to take the audio and to mutilate it,” says Shields. “It was so beautiful in its raw form that I knew I had to treat it as a collaborator and not as a canvas.” Both artists were conscious of not wanting make “spa music, or something a little bit trite,” Shields adds.   

Imperfect Cadence is far from it. From the bird calls playing in tandem with Shield’s rich voice on the stirring opener “You & I” to the gentle waves on the orchestral “Than Water,” the project is a sophisticated and moving balance of input from both artists. “It was a genuine collaboration with the sort of oddity that Martyn wasn’t contributing musically,” says Shields. “He was contributing to the overall atmosphere and theme.”